Several things have been going on in the world of the Zombie Medic, I am finishing my fist year of my masters in Forensic Computing, this last quarter was really tough and I hope the next class isn’t as heavy on research papers.
My eventual goal is to work for law enforcement or another group to help fight sex trafficking and the exploitation of children, because in my mind there is no more vile a creature as that of someone who would prey upon a child, and these monsters should be hunted down at every opportunity, because that is the role they seem to want to play, so I and others like me will the play we are destined to play, the ones that stop the monsters.
My business Korstog Training (korstogtraining.com) has moved into a new office space, working on getting consistent classes running and getting more students has been going with mixed results, I am hoping that after the Mn Renaissance Festival is over I will be able to focus on growing the business some more.
The world of web design has been rather interesting for me over the last few weeks. I recently decided that I was going to try to get my freelance business up and running again, one as a way to increase revenues and two to use my skills to help small businesses succeed, so I have begun the process of rebuilding the portfolio site for Lost Squadron Design (lostsquadrondesign.com) this will take me several days to accomplish but with luck I can also get in and clean up the extraneous files I have on that site. Last December I was approached by Mrs. ZM saying that she wanted one of her cast to take over the website for the group she and I started in 2014, to be blunt I was not really willing to give it up, and this feeling intensified when I spoke with the individual who was to take it over when she said they were going to use a WYSIWIG designer to build the site, as a developer and a User Experience designer I know these types of set ups are extremely prone to breaking as well as prone to bringing in malware and viruses when not properly administered, i mentioned this to the individual and they downplayed my concerns, which told me everything I needed to know, and that I was likely going to be having to fix everything that they built when it eventually crashes. Then they dropped it all together for 8 months, during that time I rebuilt the current site, cleared out potential threats, malware, and viruses that could effect not only the site itself but also my entire server, I did this for my other domains as well.
In August this was brought up again, right in the middle of when I was writing three lengthy research papers as well as teaching classes and working both my full time job and the MN Renaissance Festival. I opted to release the .net of the domain which only had a back up of the main site on it and wouldn’t require a great deal of effort on my part to remove from the server and its database connected to the .com, the plan being to redirect the .com and deal with things when my life simmered down in a couple weeks. I opened up the domain, which required me to turn of the Sitelock security I had installed hoping that the new designer would do the transfer in a timely manner. Unfortunately Monday of this week my entire server was hit with a malware attack that was traced back to a virus that uploaded itself to the .net back up site, this took down every website I had up along with corrupted my sql servers causing my webhost to quarantine my entire server. It took me 4 very stress filled days working with the IT department at my webhost as well as over 1200 dollars (hooray for having a Sitelock subscription and it being “half price”) to get everything restored from backups and clear out the MEMZ virus that took everything down. To say I was less than thrilled by this situation would be a gross understatement, at 430 this afternoon the scans were completed and my main server is back online. I’ll deal with domain transfers later when I am not wound tight as a spring.
In other news:
2 more weekends of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, and then back to working one job and teaching,